To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Michael Ruby: From “Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep”

with an afterword about the process

1

Everything else is set up

If this is why I sent you

They’ll come

Four, please

Go on, now it’s gone

The fingers are down

The necks

And we have cereal once a week

I might all of a sudden disappear

The match

Do you want to give yourself up to me?

What the guy was giving up

What did we say about that?

Hang around for which sister?

Who else would want it?

To make sure she won’t forget it

Don’t worry

It very well could be

Um

Really

OK-OK-OK

He’s a great guy

OK

Garrine, do you know?

Stephen Kern

Yell and give me a call

I would let you know

Mino

I mean

Did you know his name is Farino?

John Stern is not one of his many friends

Try Kenny

Sirocco

I worked the day before so much

I have far too good friends in this school

That’s one of the problems waiting for you

He comes down last night

Very funny, right

No, no-no-no-no

He didn’t scream

Today, he isn’t screaming

This I heard this morning

You might want to keep it

Wanting space-space-space-space-space

She has New York, hunh?

It is, it is

On my floor

2

We listened to the music for too long

And Gus and I were playing

It’s on it

Pittsburgh

Trouble is

The rock, the fly

And the song is

The citation

The thing is, have you ever heard?

WoodlawnCemetery, please

Outfitters for the rich

I’m gonna give them three

Or one

Or maybe two

The natural, denying messenger type

It seems OK now that it’s almost over

Should be used by crooks

The household business

Hearsay

Not me

Some of it is doubtful

He starred often on the day

I don’t think that’s accurate

I’m sure you know how you’re gonna present this

Could you just tell me?

Why you got to teach?

3

And he’s partially asleep

The whole score on how to be successful officers

Don’t get upset over coastal puzzles

We had to match so much yesterday at sea

I took some money

I guess they take their money

Four hours a day, how much?

The underwear off

White Plains

I tell ya, if I was six minutes away

Tonight, I’m gonna have some problems

They’re still lookin’ forward to that—

Tell Mrs. Van Eager

June

June, June, June

The Kings’ argument

You know, we’re just angry at you

Chillmar, Chillmar

Chillin’, Chill

Despite the name, it’s really the first I thought

Why?

I don’t know

I don’t know

Grumblers had loads of things to change

I’m just checking if you can feed them

4

Everybody’s sick and I don’t know what to do

Vision, vision

A different kind of airlift

Three and call

Help the Braves, baby

Closing league

Time and anger

A deal is a deal

I don’t know the situation

In appearances

Yes, I are

Coming down the stretch, they do

This was a big problem

You are

You are us

What you told them

At some deep place

The bond was cracked and the Pomona iced

Together, that amounts to

Feasible

Now do come back, combatants

To my apartment

These are words deep in your soul

A wood sword episode

Every morning, as you can see

Stand up and—

After Sidney was born

Hopefully, I am loved so much that—

Where in two weeks?

Breeding

Very strong reasons

AFTERWORD

About Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep

When I was a senior in college, I took a course devoted to the writings of Sigmund Freud, taught by Prof. Philip Hoffman in the William James building on Kirkland Street in Cambridge, Mass. During that semester, I wrote down my dreams for the first time. I also noticed for the first time that as I was falling asleep, I would briefly hear sentences spoken by different voices, a few of which I recognized, such as my own or my mother’s. Four years later, when I spent a week alone before Christmas on Benefit Street in Providence, R. I., writing experimental poetry for the first time, I learned how to hear the inner voices at will. Lying on the couch, with a view of the Narragansett Electric plant through the bare trees, I would clear my mind of all thoughts and listen for a very particular sound, the sound of sand being poured on sand. The inner voices would begin as soon as I heard that sound. I found that after two or three inner voices, I would invariably fall asleep. To transcribe them, I had to pull myself back from sleep continuously. Edgar Allan Poe, in ‘Marginalia,’ describes a similar process with “visions” seen “only when I am upon the very brink of sleep.”

These are the first inner voices I transcribed:

How hard for it to be done

Oh, I see

7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

It’s the way he’s doing that

…take Angela

There’s no room for a boundary—do you know?

You sound optimistic to me, David

After that winter, I transcribed inner voices roughly once a year for the next 15 years. Then, in 1999, I thought it might be worthwhile to transcribe a whole book of inner voices, taking more extensive dictation. I eventually came to view the book as forming the third part of a trilogy with Fleeting Memoriesand Dreams of the 1990s, documenting three “Varieties of Unconscious Experience.”

I have always tended to believe the inner voices originate outside me, perhaps as microwave broadcasts picked up by the silver mercury fillings in teeth, as one of my college mentors, the 1950s novelist and conspiracy theorist H. L. “Doc” Humes, used to teach long before the existence of cellphones and wifi. But they might be fragmentary conversations overheard and preserved in the course of life. They might be chatter created by the brain, just as the brain creates dreams. They might be some mixture of the three. They might be something else entirely. Whatever they are, I like the idea that we have this stream of voices flowing deep within us, rarely if ever heard. Each transcription could begin and end with ellipses, a minuscule segment of the continuous stream. More important from the point of view of poetry, the inner voices almost always speak a sentence or a phrase—a line. If the line is the unit of inner voices, then inner voices are a psychic underpinning of poetry; one of the ways poetry is embedded within us. We have this continuous multivocal poem “streaming” within us, only audible in the briefly inhabitable borderland between waking life and sleep.

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]